We are excited to announce Castro has been purchased by Bluck Apps. Castro is a great app with a long history on iOS and many passionate fans, and it will continue to operate in its current form. This is a return to its independent roots. We won’t be making any drastic changes, like overhauling the UI to look more like TikTok. We’re not adding an AI chatbot. We’ll just keep running the podcast service you already love, with a few tweaks to modernize and keep things running smoothly.
We hear you
We know that over the past few months Castro has not communicated well. The new team's #1 priority will be keeping our users informed. Starting today, all support emails will be answered in a timely manner. Major changes will be broadcast widely, and we'll let you know if something is going on with the app. We’re also working our way through the thousands of messages we’ve received the last few months, so if you’ve already emailed us, don’t worry we’ll get to you. Feel free to ping the thread if we haven’t responded.
We can’t guarantee every single issue will be fixed ASAP, but we’ll at least let you know we’re working on it.
Who we are
Bluck Apps is an independently run app studio and consulting agency. We already have a podcast app on Android. Though the UX is somewhat different, both Aurelian and Castro are designed to give a delightful experience to people who *really* love podcasts and listen to many of them. This is a niche, and we intend to serve that niche. If you have over 100 podcast subscriptions and listen to them all semi-regularly, you are probably one of our people.
We are very committed to the open podcasting ecosystem and taking over such a well-designed independent app is very cool for us.
What happens now
In the short term, nothing changes. If you’re a paying subscriber or free user, just keep using the app. If you’re experiencing issues or have feedback, email us at support@castro.fm.
In the coming weeks and months, we’ll be making some changes under the hood to make the backend more stable and make sure new episodes sync more quickly. Once things are stabilized and the transition is complete, we’ll be turning our attention toward new features, such as syncing across devices. Feel free to email us if you have suggestions on what we should be working on first.
Aurelian Audio
We’ll be moving Aurelian Audio under the Castro umbrella, letting it benefit from Castro’s superior search and backend capabilities. If you’re a current user of the Aurelian app, it’s only going to get better. You may want to sign up for premium now because it won’t be $1 / year forever.
I really hate subscription apps. Will you stop charging a subscription?
Sorry, there’s no other path forward for Castro, which has ongoing maintenance and server costs. Think of it like Patreon or Substack. Your monthly fee is supporting the creation of the product. However, we’re not buying Castro to milk it for revenue. The price of Castro is not going up at this time.
Keep in touch
We are committed to keeping our users informed going forward, and we’re making an effort to reach people wherever they are.
- Sign up for our newsletter at the bottom of this blog post or anywhere on our website. We’ll start sending out updates over the next few weeks.
- This blog is our most direct way to communicate with you, and there is an RSS feed here.
- X / Twitter
- Mastodon
New country
Castro is now owned and operated in Brooklyn, New York, rather than Canada. We’ll be updating some parts of the website and relevant legal agreements to reflect this, but it will have no impact on the way the app functions.
Anything else
We’d like to thank the founders of Castro for building a great app and the seller for being extremely professional and courteous. We’re going to take good care of the app they made. If you have any other questions, please get in touch.